POPULAR FESTIVALS AND FESTIVITIES.  
What a revolution of taste has taken place in the English people as it regards popular festivals and festivities! Our ancestors were passionately fond of shows, pageants, processions, and maskings. They were fond of garlands and ribbons, dancing and festive merriment. May-day, Easter, Whitsuntide, St. John’s Day, Yule, and many other times, were times of general sport and gaiety. Music and flowers abounded; mumming, morris-dancing, and many a quaint display of humour and frolic spread over the country. The times, and the spirit of the times, are changed:—we are become a sober people. England is no longer merry England, but busy England; England full of wealth and poverty—extravagance and care. There has been no small lamentation over this change; and many of our writers have laboured hard to bring us once more to adopt this state of things. They might as well attempt to bring back jousts and tourneys[26], popery, and government without representation. The times, and the spirit of the times are changed. Strutt, Hone, Leigh Hunt, Miss Laurence, and many others, may expatiate on the poetic beauty of these things: they may deplore the extinction of this graceful rite, that jocund festivity, and pray us earnestly to resume them once more; but can they give us our light hearts again? Can they make the nation young again? Can they make us the simple, ignorant, confiding people, living in the present, careless of the future, as our ancestors were? Till they can do this, they must lament and exhort us in vain. As soon might they bid the sun to retrace his path; the seasons[415] reverse their course; earth and heaven turn back in the path of their years. What our ancestors were, they were from circumstances that are gone for ever; and what we are, we are from another mighty succession of circumstances, of which the memory and effect may no more be blotted out, than the stars can be blotted out of the clear heavens of midnight. The country has passed through deep baptisms, and processes of fermentation which have worked out the lighter external characters, and totally reorganised the moral as well as the political constitution of the kingdom. The better qualities of the old English character I trust we fully retain, but the more juvenile and fantastic ones are irrevocably destroyed in the shock of most momentous convulsions.
[26] Since the former edition of this work was written, that even has been attempted.
Amongst the many attempts to account for the sedater cast of the modern popular mind, Sir E. Bulwer, in “England and the English,” has attributed it to the spread of Methodism. Had he attributed it to Puritanism he would have been nearer the mark. Methodism may possibly have done something towards it, but it neither began early enough, nor spread universally enough, to have the credit of this change. The decay of popular festivities has been noticed and lamented by writers for the last century. It has been going on both before and since the rise of Methodism, with much the same pace of progression, and is equally felt where Methodism is not allowed to shew its face, as where it exercises its fullest power. Over what a great extent of this country does the influence of high-church landlords prevail, where Methodism cannot get footing; where the people are all expected to go soberly to church as in the good old times; and yet there the people are just as grave, have grown out of the sports and pastimes of their ancestors, just as much as in the most Methodistic districts. In the manufacturing districts, where the Methodists have gained most influence, it is true enough that they have helped to expel an immense quantity of dog-fighting, cock-fighting, bull-baiting, badger-baiting, boxing, and such blackguard amusements; but Maying, guising, plough-bullocking, morris-dancing, were gone before, or would have gone had not Methodism appeared.
Mighty and many are the causes which have wrought this great national change; causes which have been operating upon us[416] for the last three hundred years; and are so intimately connected with our whole national progress, political and intellectual—with all our growing greatness, with all our glory and our sorrows, that had not Methodism existed, that character would have been exactly what it is.
The Reformation laid the foundation of this change. While we had an absolute pope, and an absolute king; while the people were neither educated, nor allowed to read the Bible, nor to be represented in Parliament; while the monarch and a few noble families held all the lands of the kingdom, the lower classes had nothing to do but to follow their masters to the wars, or live easily and dance gaily in times of peace. The retainers of great houses, the labourers in the fields, foresters and shepherds, following their solitary occupations, constituted the bulk of the nation. Merchants and merchandise were few; our great trading towns and interests did not exist; the days of newspapers, of religious disputes, of literature and periodicals, were not come. The people were either at work or at play. When their work was over, play was their sole resource. They danced, they acted rude plays and pantomimes, with all the zest and gaiety of children, for their heads were as unoccupied with knowledge and grave concerns as those of children. They lived in poverty it may be, but still they lived in that state of simplicity and dependence which left them little care; and they were cut off, by the impossibility of rising out of their original rank, from all troublesome excitement. It was equally the concern of the civil government and the hierarchy to encourage sports and festivities, to keep them out of dangerous inquiries into their own condition, or rights. In the great feudal halls, the minstrel, the jongleur, the jester, and other ministers of gaiety; hawks and hounds abroad, jollity and drinking at home, kept the minds of all idlers occupied with matters to their taste. The clergy and monks promoted with an equal zeal of policy, the festivals of saints, keeping of high days and holidays, processions, games, and even acting the mysteries and miracle-plays. While the system continued, this spirit and national character must have continued likewise; but the Reformation burst like a volcano from beneath, and scattered the whole smiling surface into disjointed fragments, or buried it beneath the lava of ruin.
[417]
Henry VIII. at once destroyed Monkery and the Catholic church. He at once seized on the ecclesiastical lands, and snapped asunder the ecclesiastical policy. The translation of the Bible let in a flood of light that revealed all the phantasmagoria of the past, and prepared a train of everlasting inquiries, disquietudes, and intellectual and political triumphs for the future. The people saw they had been treated as children, but they now awoke to the passions and the conscious power of men. They had tasted of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and their eyes were opened to their actual condition, never more to be closed. The lands that were rudely seized and arbitrarily distributed, created a new class in the community—the gentry—a link between the aristocracy and the people;—possessing the knowledge of the one, and sharing the interests of the other. Henry’s predecessors had hastened this new era by curtailing the wealth and power of the nobility; and the long wars of the houses of York and Lancaster had already done much of this work for him; exterminating some, humbling others, and embarrassing with debts the remainder. So were the elements of a more popular career thrown into the midst of the nation; and the religious persecutions on the Continent, by sending us swarms of jewellers, weavers, and other artifi............